This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show. Kyle and Ethan talk to pastor Michael G. Brown, a reformed church planting missionary currently serving in an area hard hit by the virus: Milan, Italy. He is a co-author of the book Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored. They talk about what it's like being a missionary in a part of the world that got slammed hard by the pandemic and how the Gospel meets the greatest need of everyone living through these times. You can find out more about the mission efforts in Milan at ReformationItaly.org Topics Discussed Serving in an area that was hit very hard by coronavirus Planting a reformed church in Italy and the history of the Reformation there Moralistic therapeutic deism and post-modernism The Reformed Gospel and the Council of Trent The pros and cons of nationalized healthcare Metal music Pizza, Mario Brothers, and Papist Ninjas The Ten Questions The full interview is for Babylon Bee subscribers, so... Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show, and I'm Kyle Mann.
You know what's crazy, Kyle, is we have an introduction with an announcer that tells everybody that this is.
Yeah, but I usually agree.
Like, I say, Amen.
This is true.
I agree.
This is the interview show.
Should we just fire him?
Why are you always so demeaning to me?
You're always attacking me.
You're sensitive.
I am sensitive.
I'm not.
I was shattered.
I'm normal right now.
I told a bad joke on the internet.
Yeah, it wasn't that bad.
It wasn't a bad joke.
It was just I thought of a better one later.
Yeah.
Kyle's been beating himself up all morning.
I think he just went into the bathroom.
There's pieces of his hair missing from his scalp, and there's glass in his knuckles because he was punching the mirror and screaming at himself for messing up his antiphon.
That's a joke.
I messed it up.
It wasn't that messed up.
I know.
I thought of a way better one.
Anyway, so the guy who's insulting me right now is Ethan Nicole.
And we're Ethan.
We interview people from a wide range of different backgrounds and such.
And today we're talking to Pastor Michael G. Brown, who we got connected to through Dan, our baritone voiced producer.
Yeah.
Is that Baritone?
Is that what you think?
Can you talk for a second now?
Sure.
Yeah, Baritone.
I don't know.
I don't know.
There was almost a little Ethan Nicole crack in there, though.
Yeah, a little bit of a crack.
He's rubbing off on me a little bit.
The sultry tone's weird.
The weird thing is, our guest is just waiting for me.
He's just sitting here excited to speak.
He probably left.
He's gone.
Hi, Michael.
Thank you for coming on.
Hi, guys.
How you doing?
It's great to be here.
I'm just listening to the banter and being entertained.
Good.
Got a banter.
That's what the people want.
You have to have like five minutes of padding in the beginning that all the people can just skip through.
It's just a requirement for a podcast.
So, Pastor Michael G. Brown, do I have to say Pastor Michael G. Brown every time?
No, you can just call me Mike.
That's fine.
Mike.
Okay.
Cool.
I didn't know, like, because you're like reform tradition.
I didn't want to insult or say the wrong, you know, Reverend.
Do we do Reverend or is that not?
Yeah, they still toss around Reverend, Reverend, Reverend Brown.
But yeah, you know, for all these purposes, you can call me Mike.
That's perfectly fine, guys.
I've heard some people get very offended by Reverend because they're like, I'm not the one that's to be revered.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, there's a tradition behind that term.
I mean, I guess it's to protect the office.
It's not that the man himself is to be revered, but, you know, the office is important.
I didn't connect it till just now that Reverend.
How's the word revered?
Revere.
That connection.
Learn something new every day.
That's right.
I'm the dumb one.
So I play the dumb one.
Just so you know.
Yeah, that's a character.
That's totally just a character.
Okay, I'm writing that one down.
So you were pastor of URC down in Santee.
That's correct.
And then you went out to become a missionary to Italy.
And that's kind of why we wanted to get you on.
Well, we're going to talk about a lot of different things, but because you are in the belly of the beast in a lot of ways for reform theology, and then also with this coronavirus outbreak, Italy got hit stinking hard.
Right.
At least from our understanding.
So we want to talk to you a little bit about that.
So what's it like?
I mean, are you locked in your house?
you're welded in your house and how does it compare to the because there's that there's like a viral thing that went around where somebody described all the horrors of being in italy And it sounded just horrifying and freaked everybody out.
Did you read that?
How close is that to your experience?
Well, no, I didn't read that.
I mean, there's been all kinds of stuff floating around on the internet.
I mean, I can only tell you what it's like from our perspective.
So we're in Milan, which is all the way in the north of the country.
Big city.
It's like the New York City of Italy.
About 8 million people in the greater metropolitan area.
It's the fashion capital of the country, banking, lots of industry.
It's a city similar to New York City, not only in the sense that it's full of design and entertainment and fashion and all that stuff, but also in the sense that it's very congested, lots of people living together in one area.
And there's only one city in the country that's been harder hit than Milan.
So if you look at the cases of coronavirus in Italy, almost all of the cases, or the vast majority, has been in the north, has been in the region in which we live in, which is Lombardy.
And so there's 20 regions in Italy.
That's broken into 20 different places.
And our region has been hit the hardest.
So what the government here, what they did early on, was the lockdown was sort of gradual in the sense that before they locked down the whole country, they locked down just certain cities and then they locked down Lombardy.
And they actually did a good job in the sense that they were able to spare the southern part of the country because Italy, you know, it's a big peninsula shaped like a boot, as you guys have seen.
But the southern part of the country is very different than the northern part of the country in culture, in just economic status, infrastructure.
And everyone knows that if the virus had spread down to the south the way that it had an outbreak in the north, there would have been a lot more death, a lot more suffering, because the hospitals here in the north are some of the best in Europe.
Down in the south, though, it's completely different.
And they just don't have the infrastructure to support that kind of pandemic.
So where we're at, I mean, that's good for the south, but where we're at, yeah, things have to answer your question.
We've been on lockdown for quite a while.
We're going on our eighth week now.
So I've been seven Sundays here in my home.
And by lockdown, I mean you're not allowed to really go anywhere.
You can walk your dog.
And we do have a dog, but he's a little French bulldog.
He's kind of lazy.
He doesn't like to be walked all that much.
So we get out one, maybe once a day, one of us.
And we do have, thankfully, we have a little backyard.
So we're able to go in the backyard in the garden and sit in the sun if we want.
But otherwise, yeah, you go out once a week for your groceries.
It's kind of like a military operation, getting in and out of the grocery store.
And because the cases of here have just been so high.
And as you guys have seen on the news, we've had over 165,000 cases and almost 22,000 deaths.
And most of those have been here in our area.
So every day, about five, six, seven, eight hundred people die every day.
It's been as high as almost a thousand.
And the good news is that the curve is starting to flatten.
And it looks like we're coming onto the backside now of things.
And so there is some hope with that.
I mean, as far as big congested cities go and places like Milan, if you lock everything, if everybody stays in place, eventually those, you know, the numbers will begin to drop.
And I know America is more complex, you know, as a country, it's just so huge.
And, you know, not every place is the same.
New York City isn't the same as, you know, you live in a little town in the Midwest somewhere.
So I can understand some of the frustration in the United States.
But if you're in a big congested city, you know, and there's a big outbreak, the more you can get everybody to stay indoors and not touch one another, not go anywhere, the better it's going to be for everybody.
So that's been our experience.
Thankfully, we haven't been sick.
We've had a few people in the congregation who've gotten sick, but they've recovered.
And we're very thankful for that.
What's the pizza like over there?
That's a very important question.
The pizza is awesome.
Have you guys ever been to Italy?
Not.
I almost, the pizza is awesome.
It's awesome.
I mean, first of all, it's different than in the States.
So like if the three of you were going to go get pizza and you go to a pizzeria.
Are you doing a little gesture with your hand when you say that?
Pizza.
Actually, I do.
So, you know, the thing is, it's not the same in the States.
Like, if you guys went to go get pizza in the States, you'd get a big pizza and it'd be cut into slices.
And, you know, that's how we're used to pizza in America.
But in Italy, each one of you would order your own pizza.
And so there's different ways to get the pizza.
Before or after social distancing.
Well, who knows what it's going to be like?
You know, the thing is here in Italy, honestly, like, I don't know what the transition back to normal life is going to be like in Italy because, I mean, as a culture, Italy is a culture of extroverts.
So they are so touchy-feely.
I think that's why they had such a bad outbreak.
They're horrifying.
Well, it's true.
I mean, like, you go to church.
I see some of the funny things are posted on the B about, you know, introverts.
But, you know, here, Italy has a way of pulling that out of you.
So like you have to kiss everybody when you go to church.
And on, you know, I never made that connection.
The whole kiss.
Is that why?
The whole kiss spread, you know, oh, yeah.
No, I think so.
I think so, because when you see a friend, yeah, you do the kiss on both cheeks.
And, you know, it takes a little while to get used to like, you know, are there levels of friendship kisses?
Like, is there kind of the peck and then like the more intimate?
It's not on the lips.
It's not everyone.
Yeah, and plus all the Italians, they eat the spaghetti, like the one noodle, and then their lips come together.
Oh, yeah, they do that all the time over there.
You just like it.
Yeah, maybe nudging meatballs towards each other with their noses.
Yeah.
Right.
I think that's like the Disney version of Italy.
They actually don't eat spaghetti with meatballs here.
Yeah, that's an American thing.
They just eat pile of meatballs.
Yeah, exactly.
They'll eat meatballs, but they never will put meatballs with pasta.
That came out with the Lady and the Tramp, the Disney cartoon.
Wait, they made that?
They made that up?
Yeah, it's an American.
So there's Italian American cuisine, which is a different cuisine than Italian cuisine.
And so, yeah, you can't even find that here.
Yeah, so there's no olive gardens near you.
That's like gastronomical heresy, man.
That's like, no.
I mean, there's like denying the Trinity and then Olive Garden.
That's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but the pizza's good.
The pizza is definitely, definitely good.
So, and you get your own pizza and it's not cut and you have a fork and knife and you go.
It's like a pancake.
And it's fantastic.
It's like a giant pancake.
A whole stack of them with syrup onto them.
Yeah, it's a meal.
And it's like a cultural event.
I mean, even Italians who are extremely fit will still have a pizza, you know, maybe once a week.
That's a that's a normal, a normal thing.
So, yeah.
Well, now that we've got the important stuff out of the way.
I didn't have anything to follow that up.
But we peeked.
We just peaked, so we're done.
Yeah, that's it.
So do you speak Italy language?
Italy language.
Yeah, Italian.
Yes.
Well, yeah, I gotta, I preach in Italian.
And so teach in Italian and all that.
I mean, you're always still learning, right?
I mean, whenever you learn a second language, you feel like it's a school you never graduate from.
But yeah, I don't preach in English.
So like, why Italy, though?
I mean, you know, people, when they talk about missionaries, they think about going out to some island in the middle of nowhere.
It's smart.
But so why Italy?
Was it the pizza?
Was it?
It's the pizza, right?
I mean, what?
Grew up playing Mario Brothers.
So you already have the experience.
Right.
All right, right.
We're halfway there.
That's it.
Mario Kart.
Actually, Mario Kart's kind of like driving here.
It's not that far off.
No, that's a good question.
I mean, you know, usually oftentimes, I think from an American perspective, we tend to think of missions only in the third world context.
So Africa, South America, what have you.
But the truth is that all of Europe is, I mean, the whole world obviously is a mission field when we look at the Great Commission and, you know, what our Lord commanded us to do is to go out and to plant churches and to use the means of grace to make disciples of all nations.
So we should go everywhere.
Everything's a mission field.
But Europe in particular is a very needy mission field because it's very post-Christian, post-modern, far beyond anything that America has yet seen.
And Italy in particular is a difficult place because it's one of the few countries in Europe that really wasn't touched by the Reformation, by the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.
There was the beginnings of a Reformation in the 1520s.
As soon as Luther starts publishing books, books start pouring in through Venice, which was always sort of a kind of a free thinking, progressive city in the 15th century, 16th century.
Had a long-standing battle, a feud with the Pope.
And books start pouring in through that city and circulating.
And you have lots of discussion groups forming in places in like monasteries and universities.
1520s, 1530s, that continues to develop.
By the time you get to the early 1540s is when you have the Italian Inquisition and then the Council of Trent and several things that just put a complete stop to the Reformation.
So it didn't have long-lasting effects.
It didn't have roots that went down deep like you had in other countries like Germany and England and Holland and places like that.
By the time you get to 1542, when the Inquisition is reinstituted, by that point, people who are Protestant are either going back to Catholicism by threat of death,
going completely underground, and then they either disappeared, died, or went some other place, or they just fled, like Peter Martyr of Emili just crossed the Alps and lives in England and lives in Switzerland.
So Italy is a difficult place.
All of that is to say that for 500 years, there's not been a lot of gospel witness here.
So for example, I'm from the Reformed tradition, and there are no Reformed or Presbyterian denominations in the entire country.
So when you think of needy places, you think of like California, for example.
California is about the same geographical space as Italy.
They're even kind of shaped in a similar fashion.
It's like a banana.
We're the leg, they're the boot.
There you go.
Nice.
I didn't think of that before.
You want to get dressed up and go out for a night?
We put on.
Right.
That actually kind of works.
That actually kind of works.
Sorry, no, that was me.
I don't know about that, but I like the first illustration.
No, but if you compare those two, like California and Italy, they're about the same in geographical size, but California has about half the population.
So what, about 33 million, I think?
And Italy has over 60 million.
If you look at California in terms of Reform, yeah, Reformed and Presbyterian churches.
If you look at, if you guys are familiar with NAPARC, the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council of Churches, so denominations like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
I thought it was like a rap core band or something.
Sorry.
Yeah, no, they're not that cool.
But United Reformed Churches in North America, the denomination from which I hail.
So those denominations, if you look at just them, there's about 200 established Reformed and Presbyterian churches just in California, a state of, what, 33 million people.
And we're not even talking about Baptist churches that preach the gospel or Lutheran or Anglican or what have you.
If you look at Italy, Italy has about five, and none of them are big.
They're all tiny.
And there's no denomination.
They're little groups with missionaries, church planners, you know, here and there.
So obviously the need is astronomical.
It's just, it's enormous.
It's a country where Catholicism is so ingrained in the culture because here you have the Vatican, the Pope, everything.
You have all sorts of national holidays that are formed around doctrines.
So you have a national holiday, for example, for Immaculata, the immaculation of Maria Mary.
Forgetting my English.
We have a holiday here in Lombardy, for example, celebrating St. Ambrose.
And so everybody's off.
Everything's closed.
It's a holiday.
And so you have this all throughout the year.
And yet it's also mixed that cultural Catholicism is mixed with a sort of postmodern approach to Christianity.
Don't really believe in miracles, that sort of folklore, that sort of superstition, don't believe in the authority of scripture.
The church is just, yeah, there's probably God.
It's kind of the moralistic therapeutic deism, you know, that Christian Smith talked about, which is interesting because he's Catholic now.
But it's ingrained.
That sort of postmodern approach to Christianity is mixed with this deeply ingrained cultural Catholicism.
So that's your mission field.
And so there's very little knowledge of the Bible, very little knowledge of the gospel, just tremendous opportunity here.
It's not always easy.
You really do have to make relationships with people before they kind of trust you to hear what you have to say.
But you don't have that sort of, and in the United States, I don't think I really appreciated this until I left the United States.
In the U.S., we still have sort of this Protestant backdrop in the country that maybe sometimes we take for granted.
There's just a lot more Christians who maybe don't understand the gospel that well, but it's a little easier.
They have more nomenclature in their vocabulary to talk about those things than in a place like Italy, where Christianity is just sort of associated with tradition and folklore and our national identity, if that makes sense.
So I was just curious about this, being one of the few reformed people in Italy.
You're walking, you're at some place, a big skyscraper type place with a nice big elevator.
You're on the elevator.
Suddenly, ding, the door opens.
The Pope gets on all alone, and you're with him for until he gets off.
So 30 seconds, maybe you got 30 seconds.
So what do you say to him?
Oh, that'd be so rad.
The guards.
What do you do?
Not necessarily.
You push the button, the emergency button, the freeze elevator there, or like between floors, or what do you do?
The guards don't make it on.
It's just you.
No cameras.
You and the Pope.
30 seconds.
I got 30 seconds.
Unless you push the button, which then you'll probably get arrested.
No, no.
If it's worth it, if what you got to say is worth getting arrested, then you do whatever you want.
Well, okay.
If I only got that much time, I would probably ask him, you know, what is the gospel?
Let's just get right down to the brass tacks and ask him what that is.
Now, this particular Pope, I probably know what he's going to say.
And yeah, he's so different than the previous Pope.
I mean, the previous Pope you could have a doctrinal discussion with.
This fellow, on the other hand, yeah, everything's just, it's kind of fruity.
But yeah, that would probably be my approach.
And yeah, at least Ratzinger, the previous pope, he still thought that it was necessary to anathematize Martin Luther.
The present Pope, I mean, he thinks everybody's going to heaven.
That's not the same thing as euthanize.
Well, it's sort of a theological version of euthanasia.
Yeah.
Ethan gave me a look when you said anathematize.
Anathema.
Anathematize.
Yeah, condemn.
It's a polite way of saying that.
That's what I thought.
Yeah, I was trying to figure out.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you ever read the Council of Trent, for example, which I encourage every Protestant to read because I just consider Ninishna's albums.
Okay.
Well, the Council of Trent, no, okay, I get it, Trent Razor.
Sorry.
A Council of Trent is their document in the 1540s where they codified their belief against the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
So before that, before the 1540s, the Roman Catholic Church never had an official doctrine of justification.
So that's why you have, you know, you have people like Luther, you know, that's talking, he's a Roman Catholic at the beginning, and he's talking about, you know, doctrine of justification by faith alone.
And at that point, it wasn't illegal to hold that position.
It becomes illegal in the 1540s, and they codified that.
And so that, yeah, that's the whole idea is that, you know, somebody like Ratzinger would still, he still believes that stuff and he's consistent.
And he's still a pope.
He's not the official pope right now, but we're in this weird period of church history at the moment where you actually have two living popes.
Oh, so he still counts as a pope?
He didn't get de-poped?
Well, he abdicated, but he's still, he's still called, you know, the Holy Father.
And absolutely the Catholic Church has two fathers.
Wow.
Very progressive.
It is progressive.
Yeah.
They had three at one point.
That's right.
We had four almost.
Did we lose him?
Hey, do we got you back, Mike?
Hey, guys, you there?
Yeah, the Pope shut you down.
Yeah, we were the Papist ninjas.
The papistry was all up in your wiring cup.
It might have been.
It's so hard getting into the country.
And ever since then, we've just been followed all the time.
So I'm sorry about that, guys.
It's okay.
What were you saying?
I don't remember.
I don't remember either.
We were past the pizza.
Yeah, what is it?
I mean, what it's got to be so culturally different over there.
There's probably things we don't even think about being here because it's so deeply ingrained.
Is there even like, is there hostility towards you being, I mean, is there anybody who's like super, so hardcore papist that they're like, they want to burn your building down or like punch you in the face when they see you on the streets?
Are there roaming gangs of papists or ninjas?
I always wonder if the Vatican Vatican ninjas walk in the streets.
Well, as far as I know, no, there's no, there's no ninjas.
Well, you can't see them.
There is some.
How would you know?
They're invisible.
Yeah, that is true.
I mean, yeah, there could be some secret order of like some ninja monks that are who knows what.
Maybe that's who just cut off my computer right now.
That was my guy.
I mean, there is that.
And like we have when Mike Horton was here for our Reformation conference last October, he was witness to that.
I mean, sometimes, you know, we'll come to the front door of the church on Sunday.
And, you know, here in Italy, everybody has like these steel shields you put down like over your door, like your shop window or your shop door if you own a business.
And so our church building, like, for example, we can't buy a church building.
We can't, we can't even, we can't get a loan from a bank to build a church building because we're not Roman Catholic.
We're not recognized by the church or by the state.
We have sort of a lower recognition, which gives us some leeway.
We're recognized as a humanitarian organization.
And that's been actually great because what we do is we team up with the Italian Red Cross and we'll go hand out food for the poor in our community and we're allowed to give Bibles.
There's some law that allows us to have some religious freedom to speak about those things, but we're not considered, we're not a state recognized church.
We're rather a the best way I could put it in English is we're a humanitarian society that is of religious nature and that much is protected under law, but we don't get the same freedom that the Roman Catholic Church or some other church that has been recognized by the state would get.
And yeah, I was going to say, it's like when Horton was here, for example, we came up to the front gate and someone had left, you know, it looked like some dog feces, you know, at the front door or they've spray painted things or they'll really sure.
Didn't inspect too closely.
My son.
Papal feces.
I think a dog left that.
Yeah, I don't know.
It might have been.
For one time, my son.
It might have been a big.
I had dog feces all over my windshield one time and that was not a dog.
That was my.
The man that my mother married, you're supposed to call him stepfather, but it was way after I moved out.
He was very petty, and I had spilled a little bit of pipe tobacco on his front porch in the night.
He was so mad at me that he gathered up all the dog feces in his yard into a bucket and dumped it on the windshield of my car in the morning.
And I had to figure out, I'm like, what kind of bird did this?
That was so exciting.
A big one.
Anyway, sorry.
Anecdote.
That's a disturbing anecdote.
He's not with us anymore.
He was a very petty guy.
Sorry, so dog feces left in a place.
Yeah, just stuff like that.
And, you know, there's been times where, yeah, we do a lot of, we do a lot of, circulate a lot of videos.
Like a Paul, we do these short little apologetic videos and circulate them.
And sometimes, you know, you get a lot of backlash.
But, you know, it's nothing.
I mean, we're not, we're not being, you know, we're not being arrested or beat up or anything like that.
And the truth is, a lot of people are very interested.
So, yeah, I think I was saying my neighbors, for example, we've developed a great relationship with them.
And the eldest person in the household with whom we had a relationship also, she died.
And so the family asked me to come to the funeral.
It's in a big Roman Catholic church.
And maybe two minutes before the funeral begins, the family was speaking with the priest.
And the priest asked me to come up and said, hey, would you give a few words in Italian tells me would you give a few words from the heart?
And I understand that you're an evangelical pastor and I still share.
You're going to hand me the pulpit.
All right.
And so, yeah, I had an opportunity to preach the gospel for about 10 minutes from the resurrection.
And they're listening.
Well, it's amazing.
It's just amazing that you can be in a country like Italy, a European country.
It's not third world.
It's not way out in the jungle someplace.
It's rather a country with a huge and rich Christian history.
And yet people haven't heard the gospel.
They've just, they haven't heard it.
I mean, I live here in Milan, and this is the city where Ambrose was a pastor for a long time, a bishop.
He baptized Augustine.
You can still go see the place where Augustine was baptized.
And there's churches and crosses everywhere, just everywhere.
And yet people don't, yeah, so I had to do like a little video on what's the significance of the cross.
You know, they just think of it as a symbol of religion or Christianity in general, kind of Italian identity.
But not, okay, that's the place where our Lord paid for our sins under the wrath of God.
And there was this exchange, you know, our sin for his righteousness.
That's just like totally new to them.
They haven't heard that before.
Wow.
So, yeah, it's fascinating.
It's a fascinating place.
It's a tremendous place for it's not easy.
All of Europe is not easy as a mission field.
But yeah, we tend to think, I think in America, we tend to think of places like Italy as a vacation destination rather than see the artwork.
See if it lives up top.
Mario.
Yeah.
Well, it's true, though.
I mean, like, you go to Pole.
Take the Mario tour.
This is his mansion here.
This is where he earned his millions.
This is the plumbing shop he owned.
You don't know anything about Mario.
I actually, yeah, I raised two boys.
I used to, I confess, I used to play Mario.
I'm talking to Ethan.
He's talking about stuff that's not in the celebrity from Italy.
You'd see the little plumbing shop where he started out.
Gotcha.
And they'd have that.
And then you'd go and see the mansion that he started, his first mansion and stuff.
And you visit the houses of his ex-wives and things like that.
And this pizza shop.
He's not doing well now.
He's like, he's a drunk.
Yeah.
He's doing mushrooms all the time.
Mushroom addict.
Obviously.
Did we interrupt something?
I don't know.
I don't know.
That was great.
Oh, yeah, because people think of it as a vacation destination.
I'm curious.
And this may be a completely ignorant question because these guys are always all every time I get into this reform stuff.
I'm like, these guys look at me like, idiot, go on.
What did you think Reformed was when we first talked about it?
You had some, you're like, reformed?
What's I just always thought, I just figured, I had never, I hadn't realized there's this really specific movement of reformed people until I met these guys.
I've been hearing about it, but I just thought that it was like just, there's Catholics and then there's the Reformed Church, which is just, you know, you read your Bible and the Pope doesn't tell you what to think or whatever.
That's the heart of it.
Yeah.
Okay.
True.
But I'm curious because there is this divide within Christianity.
Sometimes when we, well, for one thing, we're huge GK Chesterton fans.
He's Catholic.
Okay.
Hardcore Catholic.
Love Chesterton.
He was a Catholic.
He was a Catholic.
Yeah.
You don't think he's still alive?
So he's Reformed now.
Oh.
He's in glory.
There's some people that will not, you know, they see Catholic, like even I had this old man I used to have breakfast with, this prayer warrior guy, and he would, he had come out of the Catholic Church and he would say very authoritatively, the Catholic Church is a satanic institution.
And there's other people who just consider other Christians that have kind of a different way of going about it or whatever.
Obviously, I mean, so I guess where are you on that?
And also, I guess, you know, are you there trying to convert Catholics to your side or like just whoever you can find?
Or is there a goal?
Like, do you see something in the Catholic Church that needs a need there that you're trying to meet?
Or is it more just the culture of Italy?
Or I guess there's questions.
Those are great questions.
And I'm so glad you asked those.
So, so, yeah, to your first question, you know, here's the deal with regard to my approach to Catholics.
I am very non-polemic when it comes to my approach because I'm a missionary.
Are you frantically googling polemic?
I am right now.
Yeah.
In other words, people are writing attack on someone.
Yeah.
So, I mean, unfortunately.
Oh, there is an adjective.
Yeah.
Oplemical.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
I was a little.
Yeah.
So in other words, like, I'm not going around telling people why, you know, their pictures of Jesus are a violation of the Second Commandment, which is, you know, that's like a big deal for us as reformed people.
I just, it's like the least, it's like such an it's such a small thing compared to the big thing from where I'm at right now as a missionary because they don't know, they don't know the gospel.
So rather than getting into an argument with them about the violation of the second commandment or because there's pictures of Jesus everywhere.
Yeah, how do they not know the gospel?
And like very strange.
Well, it's true.
I mean, here's the deal.
That's why I was saying reading the Council of Trent.
It's not the Trent, the Council of Trent is not big.
It's small.
You can read it and it's really, really interesting if you like theology at all.
You'll find it, I think, intriguing because it'll go down the list and it'll say things like, if you believe that we are justified by Christ's righteousness being imputed to us, which we receive by faith alone, anyone who believes that, let him be anathema.
In other words, condemned.
And they were talking to the reformers of the 16th century at that time.
So it was actually illegal to believe that in the 16th century, after 1540, 1540s, after Trent, and you could die for it.
And so today, obviously, there's more freedom of religion.
There's things that have happened, movements that have happened in Italy that allow for people to believe other dogmas besides Roman Catholic dogma.
And now after Vatican II in the 60s, everything's kind of squishy and liberal.
However, people just don't know the gospel.
And so I want to tell people the good news that sinners like us can be made right with God and be adopted by God solely on the basis of Christ's work, his merit, his life, death, resurrection, which we can receive by faith alone.
But I've got to find, you know, talking places where I'm able to meet people where they're at.
And a lot of that is just by making, developing friendships with them.
Because as I said, time people are very, they're very talkative.
They're very interested why an American, a guy from California, would be in Milan.
When they find out, like, I'm from San Diego, they're like, why on earth?
Why would you come here?
So that's always an open door.
And I tell them who I am, what I'm doing here.
And some people don't like it.
Other people, you know, we've developed friendships and they'll listen to my sermons online.
They'll ask me questions.
And, you know, slowly but surely they'll coming around.
So yeah, is there something missing in the Catholic Church?
Yeah, the main thing is the gospel.
Because here's the deal.
And this is important, maybe for all your, probably the most important thing I'll say on this program, is that if, you know, the Roman Catholic Church, if they officially reversed their decision at the Council of Trent and they embraced the gospel and said,
you know, we believe now in the authority of scripture over the authority of the Pope and we believe that, you know, a sinner is justified solely on the basis of Christ's work, which he receives through faith alone, as Paul says, then we should all become Catholics.
We should all unite.
We shouldn't be divided.
The reason we're Protestants, the reason we protest, the reason, you know, that for that word Protestant, is because Rome has rejected these things.
So even though getting back to kind of your first question, I mean, I do believe that there are Roman Catholics who are Christians, not because of their theology, but in spite of it.
And so, you know, there's a lot of Roman Catholics I've talked to that just their knowledge of doctrine is so scant.
But in talking with them, it's pretty clear that they are banking on what Christ has accomplished, not on their own works or their own abilities to get them to heaven or even their cooperation with God's grace, which is official Roman dogma, that you have to cooperate with what God offers in order to accumulate enough merit,
congruent merit in order to be acceptable to God in the end.
And there's better news than that.
There's hope.
And man, we need hope, especially right now.
People need hope.
The thing is with Roman Catholic doctrine is there's no assurance.
You have no assurance that you're going to go to heaven.
The best you can hope for is that you're going to spend 10, 20, 50,000 years in purgatory.
And maybe after all that's burned off, you'll get there.
But there's better news than that.
There's better hope, a living hope that we can be assured that we're right with God right now.
And so back in California, yeah, I loved preaching that gospel.
I loved living in San Diego and loved our church and where we lived.
And it was wonderful.
But the need in other parts of the world is so great.
And there's a whole story behind how I got here.
But learning the Italian language and ending up here, we feel very privileged to get to know these wonderful people here in Italy and meet them where they're at and preach the gospel.
And we're seeing them now.
We're seeing them come into church.
Our congregation is about 50 people now.
And yeah.
And so it's a blessing.
But I don't take a hard line approach.
And I don't come out.
The first thing I say to them is like, you shouldn't pray to Mary.
That's just, that's not the right approach.
And I know there's so many folks in America that just feel so strongly about these things that that's great, but they shouldn't be missionaries in Italy because you got to, you know, those things will take care of themselves later.
Let's get to the, let's get to the brass tacks.
Let's talk about how you are right with God and what Christ has accomplished.
And then we'll deal with the other things that the doctrines that we believe are aberrant, are wrong.
Well, counterpoint.
Catholics have J.R. Tolkien.
That's true.
That is true.
Do they?
Yeah.
And Catholics have all kinds of cool guys.
GK Chesterton.
I know.
I did want to make a quick note to Dan at the beginning of this segment of what the pastor said.
He said, this is the most important thing I will say in this entire podcast.
And then you cut off.
Put the paywall right there, Kay.
That's what it needs to be.
That's where we cut off and we go to subscribers.
Yeah.
Subscriber.
We make them pay for the gospel.
You pay for the gospel on the Babylon Day podcast.
I don't know if this is even worth talking about, but when all this coronavirus stuff was bubbling up, everybody in America, well, not everybody, but all the socialists were like, oh, if only we had single payer health care, we'd be fine.
And then the obvious question was like, well, Italy has that and they're not really fine.
Do you have any view on that?
Like from your perspective, living there experience or healthcare system stuff.
Yeah, you know, guys, honestly, I mean, like our experience here with the healthcare system, to be totally honest with you, I see pros and cons.
And I mean, I remember, yeah, being in San Diego and having to go to the ER, and sometimes you'd wait, you know, four or five hours.
If it was on a Friday night and there's a bunch of football injuries, you're stuck there for a while.
And then there's all these co-pays and everything else.
So, yeah, here, taxes are like astronomical.
It's ridiculous.
Taxes are so high that it just suffocates a growing economy.
But in terms of just strictly speaking about healthcare, yeah, I mean, to be totally honest with you, you can see advantages and disadvantages on both sides, just as far as that goes.
In terms of the outbreak and the reason why there were deaths, yeah, I mean, you know, I had some people online make comments like that.
It's so sad that people are dying because of socialism or whatever.
No, I don't believe that either.
I didn't think that was really a helpful statement because, you know, the truth is, is that it doesn't matter what kind of healthcare you have, if you have only so many hospitals and so many hospital beds and you have a massive outbreak in your particular city and those hospitals are now flooded, you're just going to have more problems.
It's just, it can't support itself.
How you pay, whether it's through taxes or out of pocket, is irrelevant at that point.
And so, yeah, as far as that goes, I don't know.
I mean, what's better in terms of getting your care here, there's been some real, we've seen some real advantages to how they're able to mobilize things and the care's been pretty good.
But yeah, I don't think that there, I just don't see a connection between their nationalized health care and the amount of deaths that they've had.
It's just been, you know, they haven't been able to support.
I heard there's actually more hospital beds per capita in Italy than there are in the United States.
So that just shows you that if you're suffering an outbreak in one particular part, it's just going to be what it is.
So that's my non-answer for you.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of my impression of it too.
Everybody wants to politicize everything, but sounds like communism to me.
I don't know.
No, yeah, it's just more that people always draw whatever connection they want.
And it's like no healthcare system is built for a once-in-a-century pandemic.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot.
Thanks, guys.
It's a lot of fun.
Yeah, you've got to got a book?
All right.
Well, if anyone wants to find out more about Pastor Michael G. Brown and the work he's doing in Milan, you can go to ReformationItaly.org.
He also co-authored a book called Sacred Bond, Covenant Theology Explored, where he owns dispensationalists with facts and logic.
Is that accurate?
Yes.
I mean, we do it in a subtle way.
Sure.
I don't know.
Sorry.
I'm sorry if I ruined it.
Yeah, you can get that book on Amazon and such.
So awesome.
Thanks a lot, Pastor.
Reverend.
Thanks, guys.
A lot of fun.
Yeah.
And Dan, are you still there?
I'm here.
Hey.
You didn't say anything all the time.
Oh, I'm usually the background guy.
He's the guy that went out and run the stuff.
Yeah.
That was fantastic.
It was fun talking with you guys.
Thanks for making me laugh.
It's good seeing your face.
I know you can't see us, but Dan's just been staring at your face.
He's been staring at you.
It was a lot of fun and really appreciate it.
Appreciate the work you guys are doing.
And yeah, Dan, miss you and miss your family.
And so take care.
Well, stay safe, guys.
Take care.
Yeah, God bless you.
God bless you.
Thank you.
God bless you.
Talk to you later.
All right.
Bye now.
Bye-bye.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
You are like mousedropping in the pepper.
Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?
He accepted me.
And I'll be forever grateful and worshiping him for all of eternity.
So this is going to be our first foreign language bleeping.
Number one, have you met Carmen?
Carmen the Pentecostal singer?
Yeah.
Yeah, the rapper.
No, by God's grace, no.
And I like put my face up to her, and she kind of turned weird, and I was almost on her lips.
I was like, I got it.
The most awkward moment of my life.
And I'm going to overturn the Council of Trent.
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